Angry Middle-Aged Man

Is Larry David funnier than everyone else, or just more annoying?

“Every relationship is just so tenuous,” David says. “One tiny miscommunication or mistake and it could be all over.”

Illustration by Steve Brodner

At the end of the nineteen-eighties, Larry David was a standup comic in trouble. He was middle-aged, single, living in a building with subsidized housing for artists on the West Side of Manhattan, and just scraping by. He had been doing standup, with mixed success, for more than a decade; his chances for breaking through were long past. He had written for and acted on a short-lived ABC variety show called “Fridays.” He had been on the writing staff of “Saturday Night Live” in the 1984-85 season, though only one of his sketches aired. He had played bit parts in a few movies. He had written a screenplay—a dark comedy, never produced—called, appropriately, “Prognosis Negative.”

David had a reputation as a comic’s comic—“which means I sucked,” he likes to say. His material was uncompromisingly to his own taste, filled with wild tirades about apparent trivialities. In one routine, he went on at length about the use of the familiar “you” in foreign languages (“Caesar used the tu form with Brutus even after Brutus stabbed him, which I think is going too far”). He imagined himself as a professional masturbator so talented that people stopped him on the street to ask for advice (“You must practice!”). He wondered how answering machines might have changed the Old West. (For one thing, you could get out of joining a dangerous posse by screening your calls.)

David’s onstage manner was almost willfully uningratiating. He was intense and bespectacled, and often wore an old Army jacket. He had started going bald at thirty, and by his early forties “the hair was a combination of Bozo and Einstein,” the comedian Richard Lewis says. David and Lewis, who were born three days apart, originally met at Camp All America, in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, when they were thirteen. They disliked each other immediately. A dozen years later, they met again, at the bar of the Improv, a comedy club in Manhattan, and became close friends. “Talk about walking to the beat of your own drum,” Lewis says of David. “I mean, this guy was born in a snare drum.”

Club audiences were puzzled by David, or, worse, indifferent to him. The managers who occasionally took him on invariably recommended that he make his material more accessible. He found new managers. “I was not for everyone,” Larry David said, laughing, when I met him last October. “I was for very few.” He was sitting at his big desk in the Santa Monica offices of Larry David Productions, the company behind “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the half-hour cinéma-vérité situation comedy on HBO.

Contrary to the cliché that comedians are stingy about giving out what they most ardently seek, Larry David is a surprisingly easy laugh. He has several laughs, ranging from a brief, wry exhalation that reveals what Shelley Berman (who plays David’s father on “Curb”) calls his “wondrously perfect teeth,” with their pronounced canines, to an uninhibited guffaw. Perhaps David’s most striking laugh, however, is a snort that is exactly like the one Jason Alexander made famous when he played “Seinfeld” ’s George Costanza—a character who, David claims, is largely based on himself.

The similarities between prototype and character are not instantly apparent. David has a lanky, wiry build and an athletic, slightly bowlegged walk. His cranium is long and sleek, surrounded by a fringe of curly whitish hair that is neatly trimmed, except for rampant sideburns. The afternoon we met, he wore what was evidently a customary outfit, in a style that I came to think of as comedy-tycoon casual: a navy-blue shirt jacket, a medium-blue zipper-neck shirt, khakis, white socks, and dingy beige Pumas.

On “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” David’s character is a semi-retired sitcom mogul who ambles through his inordinately comfortable life, routinely managing to annoy or infuriate everyone around him. This season, some of those people will include the blind, the physically handicapped, and the mentally challenged, making the show even edgier than before.

David, who, in 1988, co-created “Seinfeld,” is said to have earned more than two hundred million dollars from that show’s syndication revenues. His comedy style has remained argumentative, abrasive, and occasionally alienating, and some people claim that he has outgrown the circumstances that might have justified such a stance. Writing in The New Republic last year, Lee Siegel said, “David’s anger . . . is merely the anger of frustrated entitlement. [He] has perfected Seinfeld’s superior, uninviting stare into a cold, cruel sneer. The reason that so many people like it is that they want it to like them.” And amid the rapturous postings about “Curb” on HBO’s Web site (“the best show to hit tv in a long time”; “Larry David is the funniest, most brilliant, and most talented man on television, or possibly in entertainment”) lie voices of dissent: “Please retire this tedious program . . . a bunch of screaming jews apparently ad-libbing it IS NOT FUNNY.”

“It has to do with Brooklyn,” David said of his humor. “It has to do—I think—with growing up in an apartment, with my aunt and my cousins right next door to me, with the door open, with neighbors walking in and out, with people yelling at each other all the time.”

Born in 1947, the younger of two sons of a clothing salesman and a housewife, David had “a wonderful childhood,” he has said, adding, “Which is tough, because it’s hard to adjust to a miserable adulthood.” He hated the sixties. “Drugs scared me,” he said, in his hoarse tenor, with its mildly staccato rhythm. “And I couldn’t even fake my way into the sex. God knows I tried. The women were living in the sixties for everybody else, but for me they were not even in the fifties—I’d say the forties. The clothing just totally offended me. All I saw was a lot of conformity.”

After graduating from the University of Maryland in 1970, with a degree in history, he had no idea what his next step might be. “My standard response when people would ask me ‘What are you gonna do when you get out?’ was ‘Ah, somethin’ll turn up.’ ”

He moved back home to Brooklyn and got a job with a bra wholesaler in Manhattan. “The bras were seconds, actually—they were defective bras,” he said. “And that didn’t last very long. So it was this pattern of getting a job, then going on unemployment for a while. I had a job as a paralegal. I drove a cab. Until I started doing standup, there were some very bleak days. I was a private chauffeur, driving my limousine, wearing the uniform. I’m twenty-five years old. This is what I’m doing for a living. And”—he laughed, not quite happily—“wearing a uniform, outside, waiting for her while she’s shopping on Third Avenue. Seeing a guy from college walk down the street, stop in his tracks, stare at me agog in this uniform, not knowing what to do or say, you know.” His voice trailed off for a moment. “That was pretty embarrassing,” he said.

In a “Seinfeld” episode that Larry David wrote, the unemployed George Costanza is forced to move back in with his parents and endure his mother’s suggestion that he consider a career as a mailman. The scenario was apparently drawn from life. “That would’ve been my mother’s dream for me,” David said. “Take a civil-service test, work in the post office.”

Eventually, David found his way to an acting class in Manhattan. Acting made him ill at ease, but during one exercise—in which each student was supposed to pick a monologue from a play and reinterpret it—he got a surprise. “As I started putting it in my own words, everybody in the class laughed,” David said. “And I thought, Hey—that’s for me. That’s what I want. I want a laugh.”

It turned out to be harder than he had imagined. “I think that for the most part, when I started doing comedy, it had become very commercialized,” David said. “And that’s what the clubs were like. It’s not that I wasn’t suited to standup comedy. It’s that I wasn’t suited to do the kind of comedy that these people were coming to hear—mainstream comedy. Television-suitable material that had a lot of jokes that people could relate to.”

Nevertheless, David said, “I managed to put together an act that I could do, and enjoy, and kill with, on a Saturday night. But it still was difficult going on. Because I was taking my life in my hands, I felt. Every time I went up, I thought I was putting my life on the line.”

David had been known to walk off the stage if an audience wasn’t completely focussed on him. “He just needed undivided attention,” Richard Lewis says. “Even if someone would whisper, ‘I’ll have another Daiquiri’—literally—he’d storm off. I mean, it was ludicrous.”

“A night club is a place where drinks and food are served,” Jerry Seinfeld says. “A comedian is not automatically the audience’s focal point. You have to fight for their attention, and it’s not easy to get. Larry had the material, but he never had what you would call the temperament for standup.”

One night at Catch a Rising Star, a comedy club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, David stepped onto the stage, scanned the room from side to side, said, “Never mind,” and walked off.

Despite the bravado, he had no plan. “I was hoping that somehow I could get some kind of cult following, and get by with that,” he said. “And you know what? That would have been fine with me. I just wanted laughs—that’s really what I was after. I wanted to make a living, but I really was not interested in money at all. I was interested in being a great comedian. That was really what I wanted to be.”

Larry David met Jerry Seinfeld around 1976. David had been doing standup for two years; Seinfeld was just starting out. “Our brains had a comedic connection,” Seinfeld says. “Larry was a guy open to discussing virtually any human dilemma, as long as it was something that not a lot of other people were interested in. I was exactly the same way. We weren’t interested in what was on the front page of the newspaper.” They became comedy friends, working on standup material together while walking through Central Park or sitting in a coffee shop, one helping the other if he was stuck with a bit.

Seven years younger than David, Seinfeld was boyish and charismatic, and by the late eighties he was touring steadily and making frequent appearances on the “Tonight Show” and “Late Night with David Letterman.” He reportedly earned up to twenty-five thousand dollars a weekend at comedy clubs. As the unflappable master of observational standup, Seinfeld had created a persona that was almost completely impersonal yet thoroughly engaging. Larry David pushed audiences away; Jerry Seinfeld seduced them.

In the fall of 1988, Seinfeld received the ultimate acknowledgment for a comic: NBC called, wanting to develop a show with him. “It didn’t seem like any fun to do it by myself,” he says. “So I told Larry about it.”

One night in late November, Seinfeld and David were going to share a cab back to the West Side from Catch a Rising Star but decided to stop and pick up some groceries first. “It was a Korean deli, and we were waiting to pay, and we started making fun of the products they kept by the register,” Seinfeld says. “You know, those fig bars in cellophane, without a label, that look like somebody made them in their basement?”

David turned to Seinfeld and said, “This is what the show should be—this is the kind of dialogue that we should do on the show.”

“The stuff that we would talk about was never on TV,” Seinfeld says. “The essence of the show, originally, was my desire to transplant the tone and subjects of my conversations with Larry to television. At first, the idea was to have two comedians walking around in New York, making fun of things, and in between you’d have standup bits.”

David and Seinfeld pitched the rough concept to NBC. The meeting, which was eventually immortalized in the “Seinfeld” episode that has Jerry and George pitching “a show about nothing” to NBC, was notably tense. Not only were David and Seinfeld pitching fig-bar conversations; they wanted to do a one-camera, documentary-style show. The NBC executives were not impressed; they told David and Seinfeld that they wanted a straight, three-camera sitcom.

The executives were particularly unimpressed with Larry David. He remembers Seinfeld’s looking askance at him while he protested the network’s aesthetic. “I said, ‘This is not the show.’ People looked at me like I was a little nuts—a lot of ‘Who is this guy?’ kind of looks.”

Still, the NBC executives saw something. “I guess they figured it was worth a pilot,” David said. “Well, they liked him enough that they figured it was worth a pilot. I think they would’ve gotten rid of me in a split second if they could’ve. They would have gotten rid of me without even thinking about it.”

As “Seinfeld” ’s show-runner—the head writer and the person in charge of every detail of the series and the scripts—Larry David kept clashing with the forces of conventionality. “At the beginning, Jerry’s managers were always very concerned that Jerry come off well,” Larry Charles, the former supervising producer of “Seinfeld” and now an executive producer of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” told me. We were sitting in Charles’s book-lined office, next to Larry David’s. “I drew a caricature of him on a board on a wall, with the caption ‘Must always smell like a rose.’ ”

Charles—a tall man with a gray mane and a ZZ Top-style beard, who often wears wraparound shades—met Larry David while working on “Fridays.” “We’re both from kind of middle-earth Brooklyn—you know, Brighton Beach, Coney Island, lower middle class, under the train tracks,” Charles said. “We both understand that sort of ‘Lord of the Flies’ sensibility that requires you to be very aware as you grow up. It’s a very savage environment, in a lot of ways, a very cruel and sadistic environment. We spoke the same language—we were like brothers from different mothers.”

David wanted to bring Charles onto the staff of “Seinfeld” as a writer and producer, but he met with resistance. “The production company wouldn’t hire me, because I had no sitcom experience, and Larry was kind of new,” Charles said. “And so they flooded him with sitcom people he couldn’t stand, and he chafed under that.” When the show was picked up for a season and David was able to hire him, Charles told me, “the show sort of started to move in the direction that it was supposed to move in.” He smiled. “This idea of, like, getting very dark in a sitcom. You know, we had jackets made up—‘No Hugging, No Learning.’ This idea was anathema at that point. The idea that you would have an unhappy ending—that people would pay for their sins, or that there was no redemption sometimes—I mean, this really shook the foundation of the sitcom genre.”

The show’s pivotal moment came in the third season, in 1991. Charles remembers walking with David from the “Seinfeld” offices in Studio City up to Fryman Canyon to try to break a story: the library-cop episode, in which Jerry is investigated for keeping a book out for twenty years. “We had a couple of strands, and I don’t know if it was the oxygen from the walking, but we were very exhilarated,” Charles said. “We went, ‘What if the book that was overdue was in the homeless guy’s car? And the homeless guy was the gym teacher that had done the wedgie? And what if, when they return the book, Kramer has a relationship with the librarian?’

“Suddenly it’s like—why not? It’s like, boom boom boom, an epiphany—quantum theory of sitcom! It was, like, nobody’s doing this! Usually, there’s the A story, the B story—no, let’s have five stories! And all the characters’ stories intersect in some sort of weirdly organic way, and you just see what happens. It was like—oh my God. It was like finding the cure for cancer.”

In a far corner of Larry David’s office hangs a framed poster for a movie called “Sour Grapes.” David spent much of the time after he left “Seinfeld,” following the seventh season, writing and then directing the film, which was about the disharmony that arises between two cousins when one wins a slot-machine jackpot with two quarters borrowed from the other. The picture came out in 1998 and didn’t do well critically (“slightly threadbare,” according to the Times) or at the box office.

That spring, David returned to “Seinfeld” just long enough to write the show’s final episode, but he still wasn’t ready to retire. When I asked why not, he shifted into a declamatory Yiddish-inflected voice from his standup act. “You grow up, you need something to do!” he cried, clapping his hands. “You need”—he clapped his hands again—“a place to go.” He became himself again. “A place to go—that’s what my mother always instilled in me. You need a place to go. And you’re worthless unless you have a place to go. So I needed a place to go.”

He found himself thinking about doing standup again. Jeff Garlin, an acquaintance from the comedy clubs, had recently directed HBO specials for the comedians Jon Stewart and Denis Leary. He offered to do the same for David. “Jeff said, ‘You haven’t done it in ten years—just film it,’ ” David said. Then they got an idea: film it as a mockumentary about the making of an HBO special, with standup and fictional scenes interspersed. The show was to be built around a character entirely new to television: Larry David, the co-creator of the most successful sitcom in history. He would need a wife (David had married Laurie Lennard, a former talent coördinator for the Letterman show, in 1993) and a manager (he chose Garlin to stand in for his actual manager, Gavin Polone). He decided that all the scenes would have to be improvised. “There’s no way”—he rapped his desk vehemently—“that you can get that sort of documentary feel, that cinéma-vérité thing, unless you’re improvising. And I’d always liked improvising—whenever I’ve done it in the past, I felt I had a knack for it. So that was it.”

David called another friend, a documentary filmmaker named Robert Weide, an assiduous student of comedy history who had made documentaries about the Marx Brothers, Lenny Bruce, and Mort Sahl. Fifteen years earlier, Weide had read “Prognosis Negative” and loved it, and had become a devoted fan of David’s standup. He agreed to direct.

Shooting started in early 1999, after Cheryl Hines, a young member of the Groundlings, a Los Angeles improvisational group, was cast as David’s wife. As the show developed, the improv scenes kept expanding. Soon, it had become a show about the buildup to David’s big standup show—a buildup that led to an inevitable letdown. David’s standup routines—performed in the barking, hyperactive style familiar to those who had seen his act and those who had heard his voice-overs for the George Steinbrenner character on “Seinfeld”—became the filler.

“Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm” aired in October, 1999. The title was an ironic, almost superstitious reference to David’s low profile. But it was also a billboard for the vastly less famous “Seinfeld” co-creator.

The show wasn’t quite like anything that had been on TV before. The real-life details (there were deadpan talking-head interviews with Seinfeld, Lewis, Jason Alexander, and Rick Newman, the founder of Catch a Rising Star), the handheld camera (an acknowledged presence in several scenes), and the improvised dialogue made the show much closer to the bone than “Seinfeld.” “Seinfeld” was scherzo, its fun stemming from the constantly shifting play among its troupe of four. David’s new form was simpler and starker. There was a basic triangle: Larry; Jeff, his manager, who helps get him into trouble (usually in the form of telling lies and keeping secrets, Larry being spectacularly bad at the latter); and Cheryl, his wife, who calls him to account.

The special got mainly positive reviews. Tom Shales wrote in the Washington Post that it was “a peek into the life and mind of a brilliant creative talent who is also clearly a huge pain in the neck and has no TV presence whatsoever.” Belinda Acosta, a TV critic for the Austin Chronicle, had fewer reservations. She wrote, “My only gripe with the show was that I was left wondering: Could this be the launch of a comedy series on HBO? One can dream.”

Larry David had begun the special with no idea of going any further, but as it came together he began to think differently: “We realized as we were doing it that this thing seemed like it could be—a show! The scenes came out very well, better than I had expected. I didn’t cringe when I saw myself—I mean, sometimes I did, but it wasn’t a big cringe-fest for me. And it was fun. The scenes themselves were fun to do. I found myself laughing.”

Chris Albrecht, the chairman and C.E.O. of HBO, had the same idea when he watched the special. He asked for thirteen episodes. David suggested ten, and said he’d do it for a year. The series is now in its fourth season.

Like many comedians, Larry David carries a pocket notebook for writing down ideas. “You’re in a parking garage, and Larry’s wallet is empty—he forgot to ask his assistant to go to the cash machine,” Weide, who directs several episodes a year, says. “So he says, ‘Shit, I have no money for the valet—could you give me a few bucks?’ So you find yourself giving money to Larry David, who has a few bucks. And then out comes the little notebook.”

“What would I have done if he hadn’t been there?” David said. “That could have been funny.”

The notebook is a ratty brown thing that looks as if it might have cost forty-nine cents at a stationery store. Its pages are covered with David’s illegible scrawl. “Somebody commits suicide after arguing with wife over a ‘Seinfeld’ episode,” reads one entry. “[A comedy notable] asks me to go out to dinner,” another begins. “Me and Weide meet him and [the notable’s wife].”

David relishes everyday ambiguities, like the one that arose over the question of who would pay for the meal with the notable and his wife. “You know, if I don’t pick up that check, this guy’s never gonna talk to me again,” he said. “And I’m not picking up the check, ’cause he invited me out to dinner!

“Every relationship is just so tenuous and precarious,” he went on. “One tiny miscommunication or mistake and it could be all over. I’m talking about siblings! A Thanksgiving thing that somehow goes wrong—bringing the wrong dish—all of a sudden, sisters aren’t talking after forty-five years!”

He leafed through the notebook. “Most of the ideas stink,” he said. “But you’d be surprised. See, a lot of these I’ll use, not as a big story but like a little piece of filler. And then all of a sudden it somehow leads into something.”

When the time comes to begin writing the new season, David scans his notebook for possibilities. “He’ll go through the notebook and find three or four stories and extrapolate them to worst-case,” Weide says. “He starts to weave them together. Sometimes you can brainstorm ideas with him—you can even pitch B stories to him. He’s used stories from Larry Charles and me. Cheryl got a story in there. And then he just sits down and sweats it out.”

Every outline runs seven or eight pages and comprises fifteen or so scenes; each is tight and layered, comically concise and full of shootable detail. The outline for Show 8, Season 3, “Krazee Eyez Killa,” begins at “a RACIALLY MIXED party”:

CHERYL is talking to WANDA and her boyfriend, KRAZEE EYEZ KILLA. They have some interaction with an OLDER BLACK COUPLE, who are Wanda’s parents. During all of this, we keep hearing a popping noise that sounds like a cap-gun going off. We then pan to LARRY and find him stomping on packing bubbles. Cheryl approaches Larry and tells him to cease and desist. . . . Larry starts chatting with Krazee Eyez Killa. Larry asks where he lives, and . . . Krazee Eyez Killa abruptly changes the subject and asks Larry if he likes to eat pussy.

In the episode itself, the chat between Larry and Krazee Eyez Killa (a rap star, played by Chris Williams) becomes a freewheeling improvised exchange in which Krazee Eyez Killa reads one of his raps and asks Larry for a critique. Larry nods judiciously. “I like it—I got one tiny little comment,” he says. “I would lose the ‘motherfucker’ at the end—’cause you already said ‘fuck’ once. . . . I would change the ‘motherfucker’ to ‘bitch.’ ”

Within a few minutes, he has told Cheryl everything, and she is on her way to tell Wanda (who is played by the sublime Wanda Sykes).

Actors on the show are given only the barest details of their characters or the scenes they’re going to play. There are no rehearsals. Cheryl Hines says, “If we’re about to shoot a scene and I’m asking questions, Larry says, ‘Just save it for the camera—you’ll figure it out.’ ” She laughs. “Poor cameramen—they don’t know what we’re gonna do.”

David, who spent years writing dialogue for “Seinfeld,” doesn’t miss it. “It’s very liberating, actually—I don’t have to hear my voice in every character,” he said. “For example, Krazee Eyez Killa. Could I have written those words in a million years better than that guy said them? No fucking way! I wouldn’t have had the balls to do it! But he comes in and does the character—what could be better than that? I can’t write better than that.

“I’m not gonna lie,” David went on. “There are times when I’m driving home after a day’s shooting, thinking to myself, That scene would’ve been so much better if I had written it out. But that’s the exception. Most of the time I’m thinking, I’m glad that scene was improvised.”

Larry Charles told me, “This is Larry’s thing, and it was true on ‘Seinfeld’ also. If he wants the actors to say something, he’ll tell them to say it. He also will tell them how to say it. Larry hears it a certain way in his head and tries to communicate that to the actor, really giving them the line reading, in a sense.

“Sometimes he’ll have that line in the outline, sometimes he won’t,” Charles continued. “Sometimes he’ll have it in the outline and throw it away when we’re shooting it—he doesn’t need it anymore. Or throw it away in the editing, ultimately.”

“Eventually, I’ll get what I want,” David said.

A couple of days later, I accompanied David to an allergy-shot appointment in downtown Santa Monica. “I hope you get to see a traffic altercation,” he said. “There was a real good one on my way to work today.”

We went in David’s car, a hybrid-powered Toyota Prius. (David drove a Lexus in real life and on the show until three years ago; his wife, an environmentalist, may have influenced his choice.) I asked him what kind of television he liked to watch when he was growing up.

“Well, my favorite show of all time was Bilko,” he said, referring to the classic sitcom “The Phil Silvers Show,” which starred Silvers as the scheming Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko, in charge of the motor pool at the fictional Fort Baxter, Kansas. “I just thought that was head and shoulders above any other show I had seen. You know, in analyzing it now, you could see that Bilko was a manipulative character”—he smiled, giving me a pointed look—“who did a lot of kind of unlikable, despicable things. But, because he was so funny doing it, it all just worked.”

David’s style and process are remarkably similar to those of Bilko’s creator, Nat Hiken, a towering figure of nineteen-fifties situation comedy, who died in 1968. As David Everitt points out in his biography of Hiken, “King of the Half Hour,” the nineteen-fifties was an era of simply plotted sitcoms, like “I Love Lucy.” Hiken’s achievement was to create plots based on multiple interweaving strands that resolved perfectly (and hilariously). Like David, Hiken often gave an actor a line or a sight gag just before he went on camera. And in Phil Silvers he had one of the best ad-libbers in the business.

David may also have absorbed Hiken’s aversion to jokiness. For the first two seasons of “Curb,” Cheryl Hines says, David refused to show her an outline. He was worried that the actors would try to prepare funny bits and work them into the scenes. “One of the things about our show is, the more you try not to be funny, the better,” she says.

David has a sardonic, slightly depressive presence onscreen, and is quite natural playing his worst self. Some of his finest moments are when he gets into arguments—arguments that he always loses—with children. In one episode, he refers to Ted Danson as an asshole—spelling the word out—in front of Danson’s young daughter. (Carefully chosen celebrity friends of David’s regularly appear on the show, adding to its voyeuristic interest.) Moments later, Danson’s daughter—who, it turns out, knows how to spell—accidentally knocks out David’s front teeth with a piñata bat.

David constantly speaks his mind (or fudges the truth) at inopportune moments, violating subtle boundaries, and then delivers forced apologies. There are boundaries on the show, however. One afternoon, during editing, I saw him frown sharply during a scene when Cheryl Hines called him an ass. “It was way too harsh,” he told me later. “It wasn’t funny, and it was demeaning.”

He tries to avoid overusing the word “fuck,” but not out of prudishness. “Susie”—Susie Essman, who plays David’s manager’s wife—“uses it all the time. That’s her character,” David said. “That’s the way she talks. But I don’t want to be a guy who’s depending on using four-letter words to get my laughs. Sometimes it comes out of my mouth when we’re shooting. And I’ll look at it afterward and go, ‘Find another take where I don’t say it.’ ”

Thanks to the freedom of cable TV, the show can be casually raunchy, but it also has a certain sunniness, signalled by the tuba-and-mandolin opening theme song (Luciano Michelini’s “Frolic”) and the musical transitions, many of which have the same Italian-circus flavor. The sweetness, of course, has an edge: David is fond of cutting in an especially upbeat air, Franco Micalizzi’s “Amusement”—the staff call it “Everything’s Fine”—immediately after his character has perpetrated some disaster.

One afternoon in late October, the “Curb” cast and crew—twenty people, seven trucks of equipment, and various cars containing the principals—descended on an airport hotel not far from LAX, for a reshoot of a scene between Larry David and Richard Lewis.

The scene was originally shot in an expository fashion, with the two men standing and talking on the street. David felt that it just wasn’t funny enough. This time, he decided to set it at the urinals in a men’s room and add a former N.B.A. superstar.

Driving down to the reshoot, David was ebullient. “ ‘I’ll be seeing youuuu,’ ” he crooned, then added, brightly, “It’s gonna be fun seeing Richard.” Lewis, who has been a periodic presence on the show since the first episode, is a perfect foil to the otherwise less demonstrative David: they get each other going. Their scenes crackle with a comic intensity that frequently causes David to burst into laughter in the middle of a take. “We could start screaming and yelling over the slightest thing,” Lewis says. “I always forget the mike is on.”

Arriving at the hotel, David walked into a conference room that had been turned into a command center. A temporary assemblage of three rolling carts holding monitors and audio and video controls was lined up along one wall. Facing the carts were three director’s chairs: one for the script supervisor, one for Larry Charles (who was directing the episode), and one for the sound supervisor. Larry David’s chair stood off to the side.

While the cameras rolled, Charles leaned close to the monitors, anxiously hoping for serendipity. During the takes, the men’s room resembled the stateroom scene in “A Night at the Opera”: David, Lewis, and the ex-basketball player at the urinals; lighting men, soundmen, and two cameramen with shoulder-mounted Sony Digital Betacams packed in close behind them. The actors improvised, changing their invented dialogue, and their delivery, each time. Once, when David was standing at the wrong angle while the cameras ran, Charles reached out and tapped one of the monitors in frustration, as if to move David with his fingertips.

Between takes, Lewis, in a dark suit, stalked the conference room, shoulders slumped forward, doing shtick, chatting with the wardrobe woman, the basketball player, the producers. David was a more remote figure, pacing, practicing his golf swing, leaning on the railing and looking down at the lobby. He whistled “I Can’t Get Started.” He was affable when approached, but seldom approached anybody else. It struck me that he was nervous. He whistled “Blue Danube.” “I smell a shit song coming on,” Lewis said. “I smell an Andy Williams summer special.”

Five hours later, the cast and crew dispersed unceremoniously. Larry David later told me that the new scene had come out beautifully. After editing, it ran one minute and thirty-five seconds.

Because several—sometimes many—different takes are shot for every scene, there are thousands upon thousands of feet of videotape, every inch of which must be reviewed in the editing room. (For economic reasons, the show is shot on Digital Betacam and converted by computer into a format that looks like film.) Editing an episode of “Curb” is an excruciatingly subtle process, in which decisions about narrative are made frame by frame—each frame representing one-thirtieth of a second of actual airtime. “If it were up to me, I’d spend two to three days editing an episode, then move on,” Robert Weide says. “But Larry’s a deconstructionist—he has to look at every frame.” It usually takes David two full weeks of rigorous cutting to finish an episode.

As the star and primary producer of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David is the only person on the staff who is intricately involved in all three phases of production: preproduction (writing, casting, and location scouting), shooting, and editing.

“At the end of each season of ‘Seinfeld,’ he used to pray that the show would get cancelled,” Charles told me. “Now he knows the show’s not gonna get cancelled—he’ll have to make the decision to stop it at some point.” David told me that, in the first season, “I thought I’d be working seven months, maybe eight months at the most. And, of course, now it’s turned into twelve months. As soon as we’re done editing, I’m back into writing the next season.”

One day this fall, David sat in a darkened room in his Santa Monica offices, editing an episode for the upcoming season. He slouched on a sofa, his legs stretched out in front of him, and his hands clasped behind his neck. His long face was, as it often is, an impenetrable deadpan.

In front of David, at an Avid video-editing machine, sat a young man named Jon Corn, who wore a distressed baseball cap and a few days’ worth of stubble. Corn had one hand on a computer keyboard and the other on a mouse. Before him were three screens: two computer terminals and a video monitor. With a few clicks, Corn could summon any of the episode’s dozens of takes from the hard drives on which they were stored, and display them singly or in split screen.

At David’s left on the couch was Weide, a thin, bearded, professorial man with a perpetual air of being about to make a joke. In a chair to the right sat Larry Charles, who had directed the episode. Charles was wearing a tall plaid knit cap, a hooded jacket in a different plaid, blue pajama pants, and blue-and-yellow Converse high-tops. With his right hand, he fiddled with a string of worry beads. The scene, which depicted David being egged by a carful of teen-agers, was funny, but something was slightly off. Corn kept clicking the mouse, playing and replaying alternative sequences that ran only a few seconds each.

“That was about three o’clock in the morning, when we did that shot,” David mused. “That was the fourth egg I took.”

“What do you think about not cutting away?” Charles asked. “What if you just took out the shot of the guys driving away and just stayed on Larry in that shot? Heard the screeching and the laughing as they drove away, and the music—but stayed on the shot? It just lets it land a little bit.”

Corn clicked the mouse once more. The scene played on all three monitors, this time staying on David’s face after the egg hit. The image froze. His face was on all three screens, covered with egg yolk and bits of shell.

“Not bad,” David said. “Well, I don’t know! I don’t know. I mean, it’s kind of fun to see them drive away. On the other hand, it’s fun to see that egg.” ♦